When designing your website, the focus should be centered on the users themselves, and what kind of experience they will have by using your website. All websites should be designed to provide a positive user experience. But, in action, what does this look like? Well, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester, we are Manchester’s leading web design professionals. And we provide top quality web design support for companies and businesses around the region. With a special focus on meeting user expectations. As a result, we have produced this web design checklist for a positive user experience.
What is a positive user experience?
A positive user experience is all about providing users with what they want from your website. So you can estimate and guess their needs, and then develop a website that will meet these needs. Users expect your website to:
- answer their questions
- look good
- help them reach a desired outcome- either purchasing a product, or getting more information
Web design checklist for a positive user experience
So if you want to design a website that really creates a positive user experience, follow this checklist:
- Monitor your website load time- a long load time will cause users to leave your website and check our a competitor. Take a look at our guide to reduce your load time.
- Make sure all your links work- users that follow a broken link are less likely to be satisfied with your website. So make sure everything is in full working order, and make sure you scan for broken links regularly
- Check your colour scheme- you might think your colour scheme is great. But you’re not the user. Make sure your colour scheme is tasteful and easy to look at. The content also needs to contrast nicely with the background so that it is easy to read.
- Go visual- visual content makes a website more attractive, and easier to take information from. So make sure you have the right mix of visual content and text based content to provide a positive user experience.
- Check out your navigation- make it easy and obvious for users to navigate around your website. This will help them find the information they need, and the right pages, quickly and easily. And it can also help to reduce your bounce rate.
- Use white-space carefully- white-space is the space around an element. It’s not necessarily white, just blank. You can use this to direct attention to different areas of the page and also to make content easier to read. Make sure each element sits in its own space, with a good amount of white space.
- Use shorter sentences- Make sure your content is easy to read by using shorter sentences that are easier to digest. At the same time you can also increase line spacing, use larger text, and place fewer characters on each line. This will make it easier for users to scan your page and find the information they are looking for.
For more information, or for your own professional web design support, get in touch with Manchester’s leading web nerds, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester.